A Movie Trailer Life

A part of me has always wanted to be that person who gets to make movie trailers for a living. No, no... I'm getting this wrong. The truth is, I entertained quite fleetingly the notion of wanting to do this for a living, but then I realized that to be the person to make the trailer would be a let-down. Because the film always is, in some ways, never quite as good as an amazingly-well-made trailer would have you think it can be. The truth is, I've always wanted my life to be a movie trailer life: to be full of expectation, hope, and longing, the distinct thrill of something incredible just out of reach, the huge potential of it all.

I just saw the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, which was pretty much the reason I ever bothered to learn to read in the first place. My kindergarten teacher read it to us in class and we got to create our own Wild Things out of construction paper and yarn (I still have mine!), and I went home and begged my mom to read it to me over and over again, but she got sick of it, and since nobody would read it to me anymore I had to figure it out for myself. So I did. So the whole reading thing started with the Wild Things. A total tangent, sorry, but true.

But maybe it's not so off mark. Because watching the movie trailer for WtWTA tonight, I was especially excited because it evoked in me the same feeling I got when I was a five-year-old first reading the book. It was a hugely liberating thing for that kid to think that bedroom walls didn't have to block you in... to realize that the world is big, and scary, but also thrilling and alive, and that I could be a part of that, even though I was just a little kid. Max was a dork in a wolf suit, after all, and he managed to be King!

Of course there's that part of us that always longs for home, too. For the still-warm supper as a reminder that we are loved, wild thing behavior and all. So maybe that's why our lives can't be movie trailer lives. We have to live out the story to its logical conclusion. We have to eventually return to a level of normal, stasis once more. But there are still so many days I feel it- days when I'm sick of waking up and going to the same boring job, or when I'm frustrated at myself for falling so short of the hopes I had, or when I'm just weary of this world and wish my walls would turn into trees and that I could sail "through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to Where the Wild Things Are." It's then that I feel it like an ache or a tug, this longing for a movie trailer life.